Angels & Airwaves is gearing back up after an extended period of band inactivity, during which Tom DeLonge released his first solo album and several books, and Ilan Rubin drummed again with Nine Inch Nails and released his latest album as the one-man band The New Regime.

On Tuesday morning, DeLonge announced that AVA (as the two-man Angels & Airwaves is also known to fans) is putting out its first new release in a year.

The four newly recorded old songs on “Acoustic EP” - “Valkyrie Missile,” “Distraction,” “Do It For Me Now” and “The Adventure” - will be available for download today through Thursday exclusively on DeLonge’s website, tothestars.com. Starting Friday, it will be available on all streaming services. The songs were briefly “leaked” online on Sunday, then pulled, a move that may have been designed to build fan anticipation.

The EP is priced at $4.99 and will be accompanied by a new lyric video for the song “The Adventure,” which features rare studio footage shot during the 2005/2006 recording sessions for the “We Don’t Need To Whisper” album.

The EP will be followed - at a yet-to-be-disclosed date - by the AVA soundtrack for the upcoming movie “Strange Times,” which is being written and directed by DeLonge.

By the time AVA’s fifth album, “The Dream Walker,” came out in late 2014, the band had been streamlined from a quartet to a duo that teamed DeLonge and Rubin as a self-contained unit.

In a statement released Tuesday about “Acoustic EP,” DeLonge ?????? said: “It’s been about a year since we put out new music and I wanted to give the fans something while the band works on the soundtrack to the upcoming ‘Strange Times’ film.

“Being in the studio brought back memories of AVA’s first album and I thought it’d be fun to reimagine those tracks and play around with the arrangements a bit. It’s the first time we’ve ever put out an all-acoustic release and it’s great to be able to do it with these songs, which are all pretty special to me.”

The new “Acoustic EP” is dedicated to AVA producer Jeff “Critter” Newell, who passed away in 2012.

“Critter was everything to us,” DeLonge said in a statement.

“We considered him a member of the band. He had the most artistic and beautiful soul and was such a big part of our lives. He always spoke with such poetry. He was my companion during the ... first years of AVA. He would drink and dance in the studio parking lot to these songs till 4 a.m.

“When we started recording these new versions, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I miss him. His spirit was definitely with us in the studio.”

Veteran San Diego Union-Tribune pop music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Ray Charles, Miles Davis and Britney Spears to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Bruno Mars. A double first-prize winner at the 2018 Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga lives with his wife in North Park.